Life during wartime Although set in Germany in the last days of World War II, Australian director Cate Shortland's harsh and poetic survival tale recalls the dreamlike allegory of Nicholas Roeg's Outback-set Walkabout (1971).

The blockbusters are coming, but this spring Hollywood offers a brief respite, movies that transport audiences to different realms, that awaken dreams, and evoke the magic of love and the imagination, films with titles like Trance , To the Wonder , and Oblivion .

Outside the frame Park Chan-wook, whose Korean films Oldboy , Thirst , and others have earned him cult status in the West, acknowledges the similarities between his first Hollywood movie, Stoker , and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt . Call it an homage, since a Hitchcock film convinced him to become a director.

Survival skills David France's powerful How To Survive a Plague, recording the battle to obtain treatment in the early days of the AIDS crisis, has deservedly been nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar.

Working stiffs This Kino Classics release is worth it if only for historical purposes, since it demonstrates that from the start zombie films embodied the Marxist paradigm of capitalism (Lugosi) versus labor (zombies).

Mis spelled Throughout his adaptation of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's YA novel, Richard Lagravenese drops the names of books that would have provided a more rewarding way of spending a couple of hours than watching this movie.

Outside The Frame Maybe it was the moment in The Last Stand when a guy exploded, or the scene when Arnold sawed someone in half with a Vickers machine gun, or maybe it was the 10th brain-splattering bullet to the head in Sylvester Stallone's Bullet to the Head .